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A High-Tech Lynching by Harry Belafonte

By Andrew Rosenthal November 4, 2011 1:01 pmNovember 4, 2011 1:01 pm

For a brief moment this week, Herman Cain’s supporters took a time out from blaming a “racist,” “liberal” conspiracy for the tumult over recently reported sexual harassment allegations. Instead, they tried claiming that Rick Perry’s team leaked the information.

Now we’re back to square one. On Friday, a “super PAC” – one of those unrestrained funds that do a candidate’s bidding while pretending not to – ran an ad reviving the ridiculous claim that merely reporting the harassment charges is an act of racism. (The PAC, by the way, is called Americans for Herman Cain. I love those names. As opposed to Penguins for Herman Cain?)

It’s not surprising to see a candidate blame the press for reporting bad news. For his re-election campaign in 1992, George H.W. Bush adopted the clever slogan, “Annoy the media, re-elect President Bush.”

But, as I wrote in a recent blog post, I’m baffled by the racism charge. Rush Limbaugh said the reports of the harassment charges raised “the ugliest racial stereotypes.” So the theory is that sexually harassing an employee is a black racial stereotype? I wonder what, say, Robert Packwood, a white man who was driven out of the Senate by sexual harassment charges, would make of that?

The attack ad was even more peculiar because most of the people shown complaining about Mr. Cain’s character were African-American. Harry Belafonte and Cornel West are of course, well-known racists. Was there another, creepy subliminal message there? Perhaps the ad was trying to convey what Ann Coulter said on Fox News: “Our blacks are so much better than their blacks.”

The theme of the ad was that Mr. Cain was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” There was a nice long clip of Clarence Thomas using that phrase during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, when he denied that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill.

The Thomas reference is cheesy pandering to the right. It might work in the primaries, when each party’s most radical voters dominate at the polls. But beyond that thin slice of America, it may serve to remind people that sometimes, Republicans dwell in an alternate reality.

An awful lot of people think that Justice Thomas was, shall we say, not entirely truthful. And that Anita Hill was smeared. The Thomas hearings were not an example of racism run amok. They were an example of the risks women take when they dare to raise charges against a powerful man with powerful allies. So it seems dicey, to say the least, for Mr. Cain to compare himself to Justice Thomas.

I’d like to declare this episode the low moment in the Republican primaries, and to announce that we have nowhere to go but up. But I won’t, because I’m confident I’d be proven wrong.